RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/should-convicts-have-to-earn-their-keep-in-prison/

“Let’s clean up the language of the 13th Amendment if such a feat is required. Agreed. And then let us remind criminals entering the penal system: There are no free lunches. You will pay as you go.”

The recent Red Scare by the Left in declaring that slavery is still legal in five of the United States needs some cautious reflection and analysis on at least one question it raises. Allegedly, the landmark 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which was ratified on December 16, 1865, saw the official abolishment of slavery. It is said, however, that it was allowed to continue as a punishment in prison against convicted felons.

Semantic interpretations of the 13th Amendment aside, and of how it has been and will continue to be applied, there is one moral question that frames the issue and gives it moral heft, so to speak: whether convicted felons ought to be paid for their labor while in prison. These felons include, but are not limited to, wider groups of individuals. They are rapists, murderers, armed robbers, pedophiles, carjackers, child-sex traffickers, and terrorists.

In being incarcerated, such individuals are not simply being punished for their crimes; they are also removed from society as they often pose incalculable harm to individuals and to public safety. They have violated the individual rights of others and have, in some respects, ejected themselves from the ambit of certain rights.

Society pays for their physical, psychological, and medical upkeep through taxation. Taxpayers pay a lot for private prisons. Various reports claim that in the 2018 fiscal year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spent over $800 million of taxpayer money on privately-owned or -operated detention facilities.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/02/its-not-just-congress-a-red-wave-is-hitting-social-media-too/

With the 2022 midterm elections less than a week away, it’s easy to be obsessed with the outcome of the vote. If recent polls are correct, this will be a “red wave” election in which Congress is returned to GOP control. But there’s another “red wave”: The one that’s washing over the Big Media and Social Media.

In recent days, the mainstream media have been in a tizzy following Tesla and Space-X founder Elon Musk’s dramatic $42 billion takeover of Twitter. Along with jokingly calling himself the “Chief Twit,” he promises major changes at the popular social-messaging site, with a total of 1.3 billion accounts and more than 200 million daily posts.

What’s left unsaid is what it will do for free speech and the return of centrist and conservative voices to social media. Musk, regardless of his politics, which range from left to right to everything in between depending on the issue, has been a robust defender of speech rights.

After taking over, Musk fired a whole suite of executives who had created and executed Twitter’s insidious plan to “de-platform” conservative voices from Twitter. The whole enabling apparatus seems set to go: Of Twitter’s 7,500 employees, some 50% to 75% are expected to get the axe as soon as this week.

With the likely restoration of hundreds if not thousands of suspended accounts, America’s thriving online opinion community is about to have part of its political and free speech ecosystem restored.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/11/01/how-the-surveillance-state-and-big-tech-colluded-to-make-twitter-disinformation-the-new-terrorism/

Federal law enforcement agencies originally created to protect us from terrorists are now being used to protect us from ourselves.

The late, great Angelo Codevilla maintained that America’s response to 9/11 was fundamentally flawed because it adopted a law enforcement approach to what is essentially a foreign policy problem. He argued that the law enforcement approach — the idea that we could detect and disrupt terrorist plots before they come to fruition, and arrest those responsible — required the construction of a vast state security and surveillance apparatus that would eventually, when the terrorist threat subsided, be turned on American citizens.

As in so much else, Codevilla was prophetic.

Earlier this week, a deeply reported piece by Ken Klippenstein and Lee Fang of The Intercept revealed an “expansive effort” by the Department of Homeland Security to curb speech it considers dangerous by pressuring tech platforms to engage in online censorship. Although DHS’s widely ridiculed “Disinformation Governance Board” was scaled back and then shut down earlier this year amid well-deserved criticism, “other initiatives are underway as DHS pivots to monitoring social media now that its original mandate — the war on terror — has been wound down.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/what-is-democracy_4831266.html?utm_source=ref_share&utm_campaign=copy&rs=0

Leaving aside the attack micro-drama involving Paul Pelosi, the Democrats seem to have two issues going into the midterm elections: abortion and democracy.

Neither seems to be getting much purchase with voters.

For reasons that seem puzzling to Democratic strategists, making the slaughter of the unborn (or, for some “make them comfortable” Dems, the recently born) a major plank on your platform just didn’t resonate with most women.

Or, rather, it resonated negatively, partly because it was transparently a cynical attempt at political manipulation, and partly because, for the vast majority of women, motherhood is an important part of their lives. The prospect of blighting that part of themselves doesn’t rally the troops.

Appeals to “democracy” is a little more complicated, but no less saturated with cynicism.

As attentive readers will have noticed, the word “democracy” is appealed to whenever it looks as though Democrats might lose.

One sign that this is about to happen is the promiscuous deployment of the phrase “our democracy.”

They really mean it. It’s not your democracy, peon.

If you voted for a Republican, you voted “against our democracy.”

As I have put it elsewhere, what “democracy” means to them is “rule by Democrats.”